Engineer's Log

LOG // ENGINEER'S LOG

Write-ups from the bench: what got built, what broke, and what the numbers actually said.

FILED UNDER: #arduino · #build-log · #controls · #deep-learning · #elm · #functional-programming · #games · #hardware · #machine-learning · #methodology · #numpy · #postmortem

MAY 26, 20262 MIN READ

Trust, but Verify: Checking Backprop to 1e-16

How I verified hand-derived gradients against PyTorch autograd to machine precision before training anything on CIFAR-10 — and why the overfit-a-tiny-subset trick catches what gradient checks miss.

#machine-learning
#numpy
#deep-learning
#methodology

APR 18, 20262 MIN READ

Levitation Is a Control Problem

Build log from the maglev platform: why magnetic levitation is fundamentally unstable, and how a Hall-effect sensor, a handful of op-amps, and an Arduino impersonating a PWM chip hold a platform in mid-air.

#hardware
#controls
#arduino
#build-log

SEP 02, 20252 MIN READ

Shipping a Game in a Language With No Exceptions

Postmortem of GhostBust Hotline: what it's like to lead a three-person team building a real-time shooter in Elm — a pure functional language — and why the compiler became our best teammate.

#games
#elm
#functional-programming
#postmortem